Maybe you're standing in front of your daughter's computer... maybe it's your own, and they're just watching. Maybe it's your son. Maybe you're a single parent, or maybe your son or daughter has two Mommies, or two Daddies... or maybe you're Mommy or Daddy in a more traditional relationship. I don't judge. In this moment, that's not the focus anyways. You're staring at a computer. The screen is blue and it's frowning at you. Your child looks up at you and they're just as confused as you are.

"What's wrong with it? Why won't it work...?"

You don't have a clue how to answer them. You don't even know where to begin. You look down at the thing. You're angry, frustrated, sad. You alternately want to break down crying and throw the machine across the room. Neither option seems terribly useful... and ultimately, you have the same question that your son or daughter does:

Why won't the #&@$$%!!!! thing just turn on and work?!

Several hours -- maybe days -- and an expensive trip to the computer repair shop later, the news is even worse. You need a new system, the old one is beyond repair. You look at your family nervously. A new computer is several hundred dollars... that's not a small amount of money! How are you going to afford that?

But: hit the pause button for a moment. What if you had another option? What if, given a weekend dedicated to it, you could build your own machine? Screw Best Buy and their horrible prices and pounding pounding techno music, screw the desperation in a plastic grocery bag that is Walmart, screw the nerds that wouldn't fix your own machine -- if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! You can do it yourself.

I know it seems unlikely. I know it makes you feel like Homer Simpson in a physics class when you look inside a Dell box... a stranger in a strange land. You've never taken apart a laptop. You wouldn't even know where to begin. Heck, putting together a desk from Staples is a bit scary for you, sometimes!

Let me tell you a secret: computers are designed that way. Computers are designed to impress us, to make us feel powerful when we use them, just like driving an expensive sports car does... but just like looking under the hood of a modern Toyota can make your head spin, so can looking under the hood of an HP Pavilion desktop!

I'm a friendly neighborhood nerd. I'm the guy that Granny calls to program her VCR, and that you, if you live near me, call when your cable box and TV don't want to talk to each other, and Larry the Cable Guy says he might be able to come next Tuesday if it's not raining. I'm the guy you call when you get that frowny Blue Screen of Death (and the one who told you to call it that) and you're trying to figure out if it's worth it to haul the thing down to Jeff for a couple hundred bucks of repair bills or whether it just needs someone to give it the electronic equivalent of "take two aspirin and get over it already", spank its parallel port for being moody, and send it on its way.

Modern computers look a lot more complicated than they really are. PCs go together like a LEGO set -- if you can plug a DVD player or Roku box into a TV, if you can plug a USB hub into a laptop, and if you know how to turn a screwdriver, you can put together your own portable PC. I'll show you how to build one in a style us computer dorks call a "cyberdeck", and tell you everything you need to know to customize it to your own personal wants, needs, and desires.

The only power tool you'll need for the typical build will be a drill of some sort -- and the super-cheap ones will do fine. Everything else you need to do can be done with ordinary hand-tools. This stuff is nowhere near as intimidating as it looks at first glance. I promise!

The next section will discuss what tools and such you do, in fact, need -- and what ones you don't need that you might think you do -- and what to get, and why.